Guambiano

(map)

In the region of Quizgó, opposite a hill, there lived a mother with her daughter. The mother never allowed the daughter to work outside alone; she did not want her to know the love of a man or have a family. That is why she made the daughter sleep in a bedroom which was reached only by passing through three doors securely locked with three keys.

One night, curious men watching the house saw a cat enter the bedroom of the girl. However, it was not a cat, but a snake which appeared to the men in that form.

Some time later, the daughter gave birth to a child, but she never let anybody, not even her mother, touch it. One day, however, the young woman was to leave to gather firewood from the mountain. She left her son well covered in his hammock and told her mother, "Take care that the child does not get out, however much he cries. He may only move about in the hammock." Soon after the daughter left, however, the child began to cry, and no matter how much his grandmother rocked him in the hammock, he would not stop. Then she took him out, put him on her knees, and started undressing him, when suddenly the child turned into a snake and escaped from her arms.

When the young woman returned and saw the hammock empty, she asked the grandmother what had happened, and learning the truth, replied only, "So if such it was, such it is." She went to her bedroom and crossed opposite her door, and then water flowed from every part of the house and formed a pond.

Much later, the people wanted to drain this lake, and so they opened a gully to it, but the escaping water killed many workers with its violence. With the pond almost dry, they found a fern which, on being pricked, oozed blood, by which sign they believed that the mother of the child was a snake.

The waters which left formed another pond in the community of the little town of Ovejas. That is why it blows cold there. Even now people believe that if the grandmother had not made the child leave the hammock so that it turned into a snake, then this region would bear all the fruits of a warm ground.

Gregorio Hernandez de Alba, Nuestra Gente "Namuy Misag": Tierra, Costumbres y Creencias de los Indios Guambianos, 2nd ed. (Popayan, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 1965), 119-120.